Six Scottish windfarms were paid £900,000 to stop producing energy for several hours on 5/6 April

[seb1]

too much energy

Shocking, but this is how it will be regularly. We still have to have enough conventional power stations to cover all we need for when the wind isn't blowing.

As Bob Dylan, once said:

"The answer, my friend, is blowing money in the wind. The answer is blowing money in the wind."

All the wind-farms I've seen recently have been deathly still! Not a breath of the stuff. Wholesale conversion of roof-space to solar panels makes more sense as a back-up energy source this month.

In the winter the wind farms will be consuming more electricity than they generate so some of that money will have to be paid back when the bills come in.

Why do they consume more than they generate in the winter?

Wind energy is obviously intermittent. As is solar power. However they are both zero carbon and a free abundant resource. Wind definitely has a role to play in our future energy mix although we should not expect to rely on it all the time.

If someone invented a car that ran on water, not petrol, but you had to fill up the tank twice as often, would you complain?

In the winter it generally tends to be windier than the summer - so wind farms generally tend to generate more electricity. There are decades of data which prove this. The situation during the big freeze last winter was exceptional.

And we were in Cornwall during the holidays when it was very sunny but also windy - saw lots of wind turbines being very productive.

By the way, the people quoted in the article, The Renewable Energy Foundation, are actually an anti-wind farm organisation. With a posh name to give them more credibility.

"Why do they consume more than they generate in the winter?"

They need power to move, illuminate and de-ice themselves. During cold weather the power consumption will easily outstrip the supply from the generator. So just when you need the most power to heat people's homes the wind farms are sucking it out of the grid.

seb1 it is an urban myth. They generate more in the winter overall. There may be the occasional very still day when they might consume a bit more than they generate. But if that was true all the time wind farm owners would never make any money!

Most people use oil and gas to heat their homes, not electricity - another myth put about by Nimbys.

"But if that was true all the time wind farm owners would never make any money!"

Well they don't seem to make much money.

"Losses before tax rose to £1.9m, up from £400,000 in the corresponding six-month period a year ago" (www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/22/wind_abnormal_fail/) and are very reliant on subsidies and energy market fiddling.

If you need a reliable and predictable green power source (and we do) then wind is never going to be the answer.

I didn't say wind was the answer though. I said it was part of the answer. The UK is the windiest country in Europe and yet we fall far behind other countries in terms of electricity generation from wind - Spain, Germany and Denmark are less windy but generate far more electricity from wind.

Wind output is very easy to predict too - over a long period and also very short term. So you can predict if it will be windy tomorrow - and how much wind you will get on average over the year - but not if it will be windy in two weeks time.

It should definitely be part of our overall fuel mix in the UK.

When you need to make sure that you've got a power grid that can cope without any input from the wind systems at all, in fact a power grid that can cope with 100% of normal demand plus what ever the wind farms might be sucking out of the grid to keep themselves functioning when they can't generate, I just don't see them as much of an answer.

Meanwhile the power companies are forced to provide a certain % of their supply from wind no matter how inefficient it is, the only reason the wind industry can make any money at all is because we're forced to subsidise it through our energy bills. And even with that market rigging it's still hard for the companies involve to turn a profit.

Why bother.

We're paying what amounts to a stealth tax for wind power that we can never rely on. Meanwhile there will continue to be a non-green energy sector that will have to be able to meet 100% of our demand at a moments notice. Let's just be honest about it, scrap the fudging, put a proper tax into place and use it to invest in green renewable power that we can depend on and really could become a key stone of our national grid (hydroelectric or geothermal perhaps?). Letting companies put their noses into the trough of public money while not reducing our need for conventional power one little bit is quite ridiculous.

Wind isn't the only technology to have received public subsidies though.

Nuclear and coal-fired power stations have benefited from subsidies for decades.

We need more renewables in our fuel mix - much, much more - to meet emissions reductions, and wind has a role to play in that. The UK is the windiest country in Europe - wind power works well in other countries with less wind and it can work well here, but we need to invest to catch up. The European Supergrid will help with intermittency because if the wind isn't blowing in the South of the UK - it may well be in Spain, say.

And it is simply not true that it is hard for them to turn a profit - there are lots of profitable wind generators out there. The two main specialist wind energy suppliers, Good Energy and Ectricity are both profitable.

"We need more renewables in our fuel mix - much, much more - to meet emissions reductions, and wind has a role to play in that"

Yes I agree that we do need to do more, but as said Wind isn't the answer. Well it's the answer that suits best the conventional non-renewable power industry as it means that we can't do away with even a tiny part of our non-renewable generation but is that the "answer" that we really want?

The long term green answer would be something that means that we need to build and operate less non-renewable power stations, wind will never ever do that due to it's lack of reliability.

So, as said, drop the stealth tax that is the only thing that enables the wind industry to exist, apply an honest tax and invest in real, reliable and clean renewable power sources that will not only help the environment but will also begin to reduce the size of the non-renewable power requirements. That's something that the energy industry wont want to happen, and is perhaps why we're pouring money down the drain of wind generation instead.

If someone invented a car that ran on water, not petrol, but you had to fill up the tank twice as often, would you complain? A pity no one has.

Now imagine a car that rans on wind , but you have to keep the petrol engine running anyway because the wind might cut out half way round a roundabout. What use is that?

You'd have to have your other power stations running in case the wind stopped or you would have power cuts 20 times a day.

I think hydro-electric power stations can be started up fairly quickly to take up the slack, but you don't get any warning of the wind stopping. That doesn't really save anything anyway so in that case you may as well have them running instead of the wind farms.

Anyone know how long it takes to get a fossil fuel burning power station running if the wind drops? I think it will be hours.

Maybe that's the answer. Give everyone who matters generators and the rest can have electricity when the wind blows.

You do get warning of the wind dropping - weather forecasts! Renewable electricity generators have invested a lot in technology to forecast that - and when it's not windy in one part of Europe, it usually is somewhere else - so with a European supergrid you can just bring the power in from elsewhere.

Even the most ardent supporters of wind energy don't claim it is 'the answer' - just part of the answer.

And in my experience it is the conventional non-renewable power suppliers who are the most anti-wind power.

The fact is, onshore wind is the most mature and cost-effective renewable technology we have in the UK at the moment. Yes, it would be great if something better came along in the future.

Or maybe the answer is nuclear?

I want to know why that money wasn't used used to give me money off on my bill.

If there's a surplus of power surely the price per unit should go down? That's the beauty of the free market, no?

"You do get warning of the wind dropping - weather forecasts"

Hold on a minute. A forecast may say there is a likelihood of more/less wind in the near future. It can't say there will be constant wind this evening so you can run down that power station for 8 hours to save some money.

"so with a European supergrid you can just bring the power in from elsewhere."

And what if elsewhere doesn't have any power? You can't just wave your hands around and say we'll get the power from "somewhere".

The fact remains that with wind power you have got to retain a conventional non-wind power generation capability that can meet 100% of your demand at almost a moments notice. In fact it's got to meet more than 100% of your demand in case the scenario happens when you need to actually provide power to all those wind turbines when it's cold.

So with wind we can't shut even one single non-renewable power station down, in fact with wind we have to make sure we can provide even more non-renewable power capability than we do at the moment.

"You do get warning of the wind dropping - weather forecasts!"

They're simply not accurate enough, which is why we end up with situations such as the one that spawned this threat where non-renewable power was already meeting the requirements and the wind power was wasted. You simply can't run a national grid on the hope that the forecast comes true and you'll have enough wind power. You have to have those coal stations pumping out pollution in case the prediction is wrong and the power output drops for even a few minutes.

"onshore wind is the most mature and cost-effective renewable technology we have in the UK at the moment"

The competition isn't exactly great...

And there in lies my problem with the whole thing, it's just doomed and it continues to prop up the existing power grid. We're busy chasing a "green" option that demands that we continue to invest in non-green power to back it up. More worryingly we're busy chasing a solution that props up the existing power industry and consumes a lot of our money to do so.

I'd rather we invest in genuine green reliable power such as hydroelectic or geothermal, something that we can rely on and something that means we can start closing down or non-green power stations.

"Or maybe the answer is nuclear?"

In the short term it probably is, in the longer term hopefully nuclear fusion might pay off.

But I still think that we need to invest in other green futures.

Danish windpower caused huge problems in the North German electric grid a few years back. The Danish and German grids are connected and the power from Danish windfarms floods over the border when Danish power demand is not high enough.

German coal and lignite power plants have to rapidly disconnect from the grid otherwise it can cause instability and a blackout that could spread across Europe as Germany has its grids connected to all its neigbouring countries. Having backed off production though the German power plants have to keep their boilers hot and ready to inject steam into their turbines at a moments notice if the wind in Denmark drops.

The whole of the European electric grid system is like a stack of plates on top of a wobbly table with wind power rocking the table from side to side.